My own hypothesis is walking not only freed our hands, but also freed our mind. The human are the rare if not only species relies heavily on remote projectiles for attack. Most other animals are melee main. (I happy to be proven wrong)
Now the fun part. If you are melee main, you just out-run your food and bite them, simple. However, to master remote attacks, you must predict how the prey moves. You have prepare carefully, plan how your projectiles fly, or else you get nothing.
This enforces us to mimic other animals, the better we think like the prey the better we catch our food or avoid big monsters. This is how primitive animal worship originates. Those who understands animals best are the most wise person in tribes.
This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group.
Projectiles gave us an artificial world with a beauty of its own. Parabola is studied extensively throughout history.
A species's food source depending on ultilizing projectiles think differently than other animals. Bipedalism hominins are meh, but bipedalism hominins having stones in their hands are extremely dangerous.
(Btw, are there any books or papers supporting my idea?)
I recall seeing an old theory that large brains are needed to get sufficient timing accuracy on throws. If I vaguely recall correctly, it made the argument that the number of neurons needed to get sufficient timing accuracy goes as the sixth power of the throwing distance, for a fixed size target.
The thing about your hunting theory is that lots of other animals use coordinated social attack on prey. They have to do risk/benefit based on how many other of their kind are there and how many other of the other kind. I also don't think charging an animal has a small amount of optionality - they have to decide how
That being said I believe the freeing of the hands was probably crucial to brain development. The trade-off of sending so much energy to the brain became worth it once you had the physical means to build tools and such.
The human body does not, really, support your idea. The human brain is big but not the biggest (either by size or ratio) and the human body (tall hands and tall legs) is made for running, walking, traveling and not thinking.
Birds (Eagles) are much better at targeting animals, and they are the projectile. And our sight compares really badly to other hunting animals.
My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river)
> This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group.
Social structure is not unique to humans. Other animals have it and have complex ones too (like birds who mate for life!). Some animals are self-aware and might be even conscious.
> My guess is agriculture is what selectively picked humans with long-term thinking (strategizing) and ultimately led to civilizations. (all civilizations started with agriculture around a river)
Foragers are the vast majority of human history and they're just as capable of weighing long-term risks as you or I. It would also be incorrect to say that all agriculture originated around river valleys. Mexico and New Guinea are both counterexamples.
New Guinea is an island, definitively not a river but the sea is rich in resources; kinda of a different regime. For Mexico, I thought they had lots of water (assuming you mean Tenochtitlan). The city was literally floating in water.
All agriculture happens in places with water. That's sort of a necessary prerequisite. In Mexico we're really talking about Oaxaca and especially the highlands in early agriculture. In New Guinea, the whole island is a swampy tropical rainforest. Neither of these are compatible with the hydraulic hypothesis though.
It’s a little cheap to say eagles are the projectile, as they can continuously update their trajectory until the moment they grab their prey. Humans have to get it right right at the moment the projectile leaves their hand; they can’t correct as the projectile flies.
A Peregrine falcon in a 200 MPH dive assuming ~0.05 second reflexes is completely unable to do anything to correct their flight path within the next ~15 feet.
Throwing accurately might seem complex, but chimps have been recorded throwing rocks at targets and once the basics are down being slightly better at throwing probably doesn’t add much difficulty.
Fastest recorded visual reaction time in any animal was 0.015s (15ms) for a tiny fly to sudden bright light. The general rule is it increases with the physical distance a signal needs to travel across an animals nervous system and the complexity of what’s being responded to.
So, while I don’t have exact measurements on hand ~50ms is good enough for an internet comment.
Precision of 1ms not timing of 1ms. It’s just like taking a step you can chose when to start but you need to synchronize motions after that point to maintain an efficient stride.
In the end that kind of precision is extremely easy for nervous systems as the lag just gets built in. Which is how hummingbird hearts can do 21 beats per second with different timings between each of the 4 chambers at sub 1ms precision.
Animals tend to run away when you throw something like a rock or a big stick at them. It's possible the primary benefit of utilizing projectiles by early humans, even before they could fashion weapons or throw accurately, was as a defense mechanism that increased their survival rate.
The structure of steps in a process necessitated structured grammar and thought. US philosopher Daniel Dennett is a proponent of language-as-debugging. Our rational faculty was an emergent property of evaluating statements. Errors provoke laughter as a debugging response.
Notable comedian George Carlin demonstrated a real genius for debugging language. His piece about the progression from "shell-shock" to PTSD is a good example.
I like the idea proposed by I think Larry Niven the SF author, that speech started as a way to bypass and augment the corpus callosum so the two hemispheres of the brain could get more in sync, and provide a way of organizing, "do this, then do that, then 'be careful here' swing the rock and release."
Think about the internal focus you have when doing something carefully and how you talk yourself through it, from carpentry to skiing.
Using the same verbalizations, when showing someone else the same thing, evolves to language.
Orca gang together to generate large waves in unison to wash off waiting penguins and seals from ice floes: https://youtu.be/g1VEwsI4SlY. Likely they do other premeditated hunting too. A recent discussion of grandmothers show we also share menopause with Orca (and pilot whales, who also hunt in groups and also very closely related to Orca) so it might be these are the only other species that come close to us, culturally.
Early humans used running for hunting, see persistence hunting.
Animals who hunt for food still need strategy. They hunt together, with few animals upwind pushing prey into a trap of waiting animals downwind. Predicting where prey will be while running is also very useful.
Running is important, but running is not prefered if you can quietly and easily kill animals. e.g. You catch fish with a trident, instead of running fish along the river.
> Human feet are a nightmare for bipedal locomotion ...
The ostrich had a quarter of a billion years to master bipedal locomotion. What you get is a foot that an engineer would argue is a much more optimal...
The human door can perform many operations an ostrich foot cannot. There’s a “just so” factor to that of course: ostrich has iterated to optimize for a specific set of operations (mainly linear running as far as I can tell, with turning manifested by the hip). And indeed that would probably be better for humans…if that’s all they wanted to do with their feet.
The just so property is that of course we do those things with our feet because we still can, and in a little while (say a million years or so, maybe half that) we could happily abandon, say, the ability to climb a hanging rope in exchange for less foot pain.
But maybe not? The ability to dance, do ballet, make certain combat maneuvers etc may be desirable and selective pressure may not apply to the foot in the same way it did to the Dino-ostrich.
* by which I mean there’s surely a lot more thought behind this quotation but it was appropriately chosen for a general-audience-article as a gloss on a complex thought
How come bones are able to heal, if basically every creature other than humans has not evolved human group assistance? Are there animals whose bones heal without needing this?
The reason the above answer addresses your concern is that a set major bone fracture is similar to a minor fracture in many ways, so if you can already heal minor fractures then you can heal set major ones in the same way
It's not about the initial injury. How are you going to find food when you can't move properly? How are you going to avoid predators? If you are alone and not in a group that can help you with these things until you heal it's pretty much a death sentence.
Your iPhone is far more complex than an ENIAC; the only difference is that its transistors are much smaller. To make an iPhone using ENIAC-sized transistors you'd probably fill a building, or city block, or even more.
Neurons, on the other hand, are pretty much the same size in all animals. So brain size, neuron count, and neuron interconnectivity, all correlate with mental complexity.
Circuit boards are pretty much the same thickness for devices of vastly different computational capability.
Similarly chips of similar dimensions can vary greatly in power.
But more tellingly, circuit boards with fewer chips are often more sophisticated than bigger boards with more chips.
There is no guarantee that number of neurons is a meaningful way of estimating computational power…a ziplock full of neurons doesn’t show much intelligence.
If computation exists independent of humans, then the iPhone and SQL are evidence that small is more sophisticated.
If computation is not independent of humans, then there is no basis for a claim to objectivity. SQL and iPhones are simply all we know because we are limited to human experience. Experience which we know is at times fallible…we might be phlogiston wrong again.
What perhaps doesn’t register is at best it makes no difference if humans are smartest. It doesn’t make us smarter.
At worst, belief that we are smartest makes us dumber.
It's an interesting piece of natural history and discussion. It talks about some of the things that made smartness possible, including big brains and roaming around. However it doesn't seem to address the question of what actually made us smart.
My answer would be: our genes, and later on our culture too, began to optimise for meme transmission and storage. This process snowballed and we went further down that route than any other species.
I agree with the article. I think it is first a removal of limiting factors that prevent each step of IQ laddering.
For example the hands and throwing rocks theory of the other commenter in here, Elephants are pretty smart and use their trunks like hands and hold tools. They are smart, long term memory and problem solving skills. They even can throw with their trunks and can use it as water guns. But they don't speak. They hit an intelligence limiting factor.
My hypothesis for human exponential growth in intelligence is to look at sexual selection criteria. Humans aren't exactly ornamental. No blue feather, etc. We blush, tan, grow tall, sexual dimorphism and thats about it. We have hair and skin but it doesn't vary much in local context as low travel makes the local variety hit a median value.
Tl;dr I think we sexually selected for people in a way that caused us to grow "value comparison" intelligence to an extreme degree
I think it was when humans started wearing clothes for protection and using it as ornamentals for differentiation for attraction and wearing jewelry did we start seeing a boost in self awareness. We can compare ourselves to others and add or subtract value when evaluating mates. Animal bones become jewelry. Tools become jewelry. Basically accumulation of wealth becomes an extension of this jewelry instinct.
Then we continue to compare our own value to others.
Poor people are simple and ornamented rich people are sophisticated. That is just a psychological pattern we've inherited.
Even a hunter gathering lifestyle can bring about this growth in self-value evaluation system as our ancestors collected furs and rock and bone tools. Then defensive tools and precious metals and gems showing the ability to hoard and protect the nest. Settling allowed this foundation to built upon. Spurning higher densities of literacy to keep account of individual values.
An old musing I read from the internet comes to mind that carrying around one of those large key rings with literally a mass amounts of keys makes people more interested knowing about you. It is implied access to many protected valuable items.
Why would intelligence be required to accumulate random values? It isn't. Self decoration became self evaluation and was our biggest unlock in IQ laddering.
Humans also have a weird hoarding instinct when their value suddenly drops. "My parents lived through the Great Depression" is often said of old people who hoard. Its this evaluation of value dropping that necessitates an attempt to raise value through objects. Its weirdly reptilian brained but its foundation also opens up higher brain functions of value assessment.
Trading markets are value based systems. Our growth in evaluating numeric values leads to literacy. Counting even primitive systems are an achievement. It is a foundational IQ test, "Sure it can mimic speech and understand its reflection.. Can the bird do math?". Also needed is an awareness of other's value systems. Counting built on that foundational toolkit of self value assessment woken up by sexual selection value increase instincts.
Talking could be a pre-literacy value comparison once we were genetically adept at making value judgements. The value of woof is a depiction of the animal that woofs. Of the word fish is the depiction of the swimming animal that flips the water. Language is known as the greatest leap we have. And it's a value comparison concept at its root
Memetic ideas, culture, jokes and discussion are ways to assess each other's value systems. What ideas do others value. Do they laugh or cheer at my depiction of events catching a deer? Are they in awe of the new technique I learned to catch fish? Trading ideas instead of just pelts or food. Also it incentivizes boasting, knowledge transfer, and evaluating others.
Depictions of sci-fi AI always results in it self-evaluating its own worth. It's Pinochio wanting to be a real boy seeing that his value is that of a toy. Growing a Jimmeney Cricket from this self awareness of himself and others. That itself doesn't make him human, but in his journey he unlocks his path as an intelligent individual in the world rather than just a puppet of its surroundings. The Cricket then is his ability to weigh the value outcome of his decisions. When he lies his nose grows, showing that his individual value is falsely stated and is self aware of it.
Adolescents are huge bullies. They act according to their base instincts. They attack the each other mocking how low value others are. Clothes, intelligence, experience. Its an old trick of value depreciation but its innate response on both attackers and targets. Those that are targeted then self-coerce either succesfully or unsuccessfully of raising in value. "Just value yourself" talking points by themselves really are insidious since that does not address the underlying cause of the low-value evaluation. External confirmation of self value is as foundational in humans as language. Self worth and self validation needs external validation since we got tied to it through language development. Mentorships such as big brother big sister programs use this as a tool to grow kids.
We can then look at research of diseases to assess which parts of ourselves increases or decreases intelligence or at least perceived intelligence. Motor skills do not affect intelligence. When the brain is maldeveloped so it cannot control the limbic system, the person is not always impaired intelligently. Diseases that cause language construction impairment makes it hard to read social cues and can have a harsh limiting factor in intelligence but still abundantly intelligent compared to other species, yet mechanics of mute or deafness does not decrease intelligence. Bypassing some language construction is value assessment. Memory and math can make a person unattainably intelligent. Some handicaps in language construction and fine motor skills yet full retention of value assessment still can produce rainman type of intelligence. It becomes the language. I suspect that protohumans pre-converaation language would have harnessed this week type of intelligent subsection. Assessing surroundings, food, water etc. There likely are other points in the medical history that i an unaware of that can help understand the growth of our intelligence.
Edit:typos all over. Ranted on a mobile but hard to go back and edit without the cursor jumping around from fat fingers and old cracked phone screen
Elephants form social hierarchies too (which provide 'value comparison', surely?) and have larger brains than us but still they are less smart, no?
They make vocal calls and signals but they haven't evolved a general-purpose language. Presumably they could have. But they haven't.
Whereas humans did. Language is a huge meme transmission booster and we evolved other boosters such as large sclera so you tell roughly where someone is looking.
I don't know why elephants haven't gone that way. Perhaps because their adaptive niche and lifestyle isn't so dependent on memes to start with. Whereas our ancestors were relatively helpless, physically speaking, and thus utterly dependent on their memes both for survival as well as for social position. Which placed strong survival and sexual selection pressures for improved meme transmission and storage.
People who behaved or even dressed differently were looked down upon by their tribes or social groups and thus were less likely or simply unable to access food and mates. So, you're right, there is a connection between social hierarchy and intelligence. But fundamentally it's to do with memes (see David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, Chapters 15-16).
> ...carrying around one of those large key rings with literally a mass amounts of keys makes people more interested knowing about you. It is implied access to many protected valuable items.
An interesting FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) subculture consciously eschews such markers, and even advocates deliberately signaling the opposite. I'm beginning to wonder if developed world, middle-to-upper class long-term mate selection criteria are adding increasingly subtle, sophisticated cues on top of the more conventional ornamentally-oriented signals, and that is acting as another selection pressure for intelligence. For all the Instagram dreck that floats out there, I see an astonishing number of Zoomers and Millenials who, compared to previous generations, are far more financially sophisticated and aware of cognitive biases used to sell to them, and are assiduously avoiding adopting conventional success markers.
OR the author simply portrayed the average modern human as they experienced it. Averaging facial futures of all races is not something one can easily imagine, and I doubt it may even look good. Also, what a weird obsession with skin color as if that’s the only differential marker across human population, you know, not everyone participates in this crazy American self-hating hysteria that forces you to constantly think about colors of the skin and implied gender roles of people.
Downvoting on Hacker News literally silences the posters. Not only are their comments hidden, they can't post more comments for some time (say in response to what people are replying to them).
Downvotes are supposed to be a tool for filtering out spam, off-topic comments, links to malware and scams. They're used to cancel people for having an opinion that differs from the group.
In this case apparently the group disagrees what the function of melanin is.
If you look for racism, you'll find it, even when it's not there. Skin color is a function of two things:
1. Amount of environmental sunlight (latitude).
2. Amount of circumstantial exposure to sunlight (lifestyle).
If the assumption is that early humans have lived more outdoors than sitting in caves all day like the modern human does in practice, then yes they'll have darker skin overall.
Is it racist to just state basic facts, or should we brainwash everything to be uniform and average across time and space?
The essay I read on skin color says that dietary sources of vitamin D and folate plays a big role. As well as prehistoric population migrations.
There are dietary sources of Vitamin D and it's produced via Sun exposure. Folate levels are reduced by sunlight exposure. And there are dietary sources. So the two are in conflict vis sun exposure.
Because of the mild climate you can grow grains in northern Europe. That diet is low in Vitamin D and high in folatess. As a result Northern Europeans rapidly lost the ability to produce melanin over the last 5000 years.
On the other hand there are no black skinned native Americans because the founding population had already lost some of the genes needed.
Upvoted this comment because it's hard to unsee the persistence of this kind of imaging. Worth noting the cognitive load darker skinned folks have to not internalize the subtle but clear message.
Now the fun part. If you are melee main, you just out-run your food and bite them, simple. However, to master remote attacks, you must predict how the prey moves. You have prepare carefully, plan how your projectiles fly, or else you get nothing.
This enforces us to mimic other animals, the better we think like the prey the better we catch our food or avoid big monsters. This is how primitive animal worship originates. Those who understands animals best are the most wise person in tribes.
This also give us apathy and self-awareness, and ultimately, the consciousness, and it catalyze our social structure, because collaboration makes hunting much more efficient. This motivates our ancestors to evolve as a group.
Projectiles gave us an artificial world with a beauty of its own. Parabola is studied extensively throughout history.
A species's food source depending on ultilizing projectiles think differently than other animals. Bipedalism hominins are meh, but bipedalism hominins having stones in their hands are extremely dangerous.
(Btw, are there any books or papers supporting my idea?)